She felt that the report should not be made public until these significant redactions are dealt with so that the Committee can stand confidently behind the final text.

Columnist concludes ‘CIA is out of control’

Columnist Conor Friedersdorf, an Atlantic Magazine writer, contends that “The CIA is out of control.”

Reviewing the CIA’s hacking Senate computers, reading e-mails of Senate investigators, and exhibiting a lack of condor about this spying, Friedersdorf warns, “This is dangerous stuff.”

“When entitled CIA bureaucrats spy on the very people meant to keep them in check, they attack the Constitution’s core genius: our system’s separation of powers….”

He posits that, “If a foreign spy agency were behaving this way, the U.S. State Department would put out a statement of concern about a Third World country unable to control its national security state.”

Friedersdorf observes that “A system that punishes wrong-doing by national security officials sometimes seems beyond the realm of possibility, but accountability could actually increase rather quickly if voters cared more about it.”

He concludes, “The CIA needs independent, empowered overseers even more than most other government agencies.”

Howard Hurlbut is an emeritus professor of the University of Redlands and a resident of Redlands.